Mr. Mark Griffin:

I will read my statement quickly. The benefit of the meeting is that it will give the committee the opportunity to follow up on some of the matters we discussed on 6 December and the detailed presentation it had from the telecommunications companies on 14 February, which we have studied. In addition to the colleagues the Chairman mentioned, I am joined by Ms Catherine McGinty, Ms Ciara Kennedy and Mr. Bernie Kiely. We will deal with the national broadband plan, NBP, and I understand that there may be some follow-up questions on the metropolitan area networks, MANs, which we will be in a position to address.

As the Chairman mentioned in his opening remarks, the national broadband plan is a key Government commitment and a core component of Project Ireland 2040. The State intervention under the NBP takes place against the backdrop of significant and rampant transformation of technology and digitalisation, which, in turn, is driving exponential growth in the demand for high-quality, reliable high-speed broadband. Continued commercial investment, in parallel with the progression of the State’s intervention, is important and the recent announcements by industry are welcomed.

Given the pace of developments, it is clear that the NBP network needs to be future proofed and capable of meeting increasing data demands, supporting new ways of working and new technologies. In relation to data demand, it is notable that in quarter 4 of 2018, an average fixed broadband subscriber used 170 GB of data per month, which was a 17% increase on the same quarter in 2017 and more than double the volume of data used when compared with quarter 4 of 2015, when the procurement process for the NBP was commenced, which illustrates the exponential growth in data. I did not include in my written statement one point that is notable when looking back over time, namely, that the last big State intervention we undertook, the national broadband scheme, was in 2008. The maximum download speed under that scheme was 2.3 Mbps. The state aid guidelines under which we ran the procurement process had a minimum download speed of 30 Mbps. As we have indicated in the briefing note we sent to the committee, the Commission subsequently updated its outlook in relation to the future technology needs at an EU level.